“The New
Testament never speaks of eternal life as something that begins only at death,
something new into which death suddenly ushers us:that is quite unscriptural.On the contrary, the New Testament always
speaks of eternal life as something that begins here and now, on this side of
the grave, something that exists as a present
possession of those who are in
fellowship with God.Eternal
life simply means God’s quality of life; and therefore those who have entered
into fellowship with God have entered into that new eternal, quality of being;
and for those who have entered into eternity, death is simply an irrelevance....I
do want you to see that this – nothing less – is the characteristic New
Testament emphasis about the life eternal: it is not that when we are finished
with this world, and the fever of life is over and our work done, that then
there will come the great essential transition from temporality to
eternity.That is not it –
that is definitely not the New Testament teaching.“From a
sermon by James S. Stewart, “Walking With God.”

“To have eternal life means to be made
alive to God so you can enjoy Him now, live to the fullest extent, and
know that you will continue to have fellowship with God in heaven when you see what
Jesus meant when he said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.He who
believes in me will live, even though
he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.’” James
Montgomery Boice in his introduction to the book Discovering God by Philip Graham
Ryken.

“A
Prayer for Courage.Help me O God.Give
me the courage to cry.Help me to understand that tears bring
freshly washed colors arching across the soul, colors that wouldn’t be there
apart from the rain.Help me to see in
the prism of my tears, something of the secret of who I am.Give me the courage
not only to see what
those tears are revealing but to follow where they are leading.And help me
to see, somewhere over the
rainbow, that where they are leading is home....’The Bible was written in
tears,’ said A. W. Tozer,’ and to tears it yields its best treasures’.....Tears
came when I visited Camarillo State Hospital to see a mentally handicapped
friend staying there.Seeing all that
bent and broken humanity collected in one place, hidden away from everybody’s
eyes, broke my heart.But it was when I
was standing outside the hospital, wishing with all my heart that Jesus would
just stop by with all his mending and straightening power and make everything
right, and knowing that it was just me stopping by was the best I could
do...that is what made me cry.“ [Ken
Gire, from his book Windows of the Soul.]

The last
quote comes from
Ed Lyman’s gift to me of yet another book from his personal library.The
author’s thesis is that God’s Creation is
a tableau which we are given to see through the windows of our soul.Most of
the time we catch only quick glances
of our world and the people we encounter.But we can sometimes gain immense gratification to feed our souls when
artists reveal to us the Master Artist of all Creation, His life and motivation
to love those He created.Gire illustrates
with the life and works of Vincent Van Gogh whose masterpieces were created with
the intent to show the world that God is love...nothing
less than the gospel
itself.Few of his
contemporaries understood; now his works are priceless because we have van
Gogh’s own words of explanation...following....

On
the
life of Vincent Van Gogh, extracted from Windows
of the Soul, by Ken Gire

….Vincent
lived among the miners, sharing their poverty.He went down in the mines to be with them, breathing into his lungs the
same black dust they breathed into theirs.He visited the sick among them, bandaging their wounds, praying with
them.And he preached to them on
Sundays, try the best he could to infuse a little light, a little hope, a
little encouragement into their coal-dark lives.“I should be very happy
if someday I could
draw them,” he wrote Theo [his brother], “so that those unknown or little-known
types would be brought before the eyes of the people.”Before long, that
is what he did. (The poet)
Rilke would later write of this as the beginning of van Gogh’s life as an
artist.“And so he becomes what is
called an evangelist, and he goes to a mining district and tells the people the
story of the gospel.

Because
of Vincent’s extreme self-denial, his fanatical zeal, and his unwillingness to
follow the guidelines set before him, the governing body overseeing his
ministry terminated his position.Angered and embittered Vincent left, and, at twenty-seven years of age,
embarked on what was to become his journey as an artist.

“I want you to understand clearly
my
conception of art,” he wrote Theo at the beginning of his journey.“I
want to do drawings which touch some
people…. In either figure or landscape I should wish to express, not
sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow….I want to progress so far that
people will say of my work, he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.”

Vincent was drawn to common laborers,
the poor and the downtrodden, particularly.He painted pictures of a peasant woman sewing, of women working in a
peat field, of farmers eating around their table after a long day of toil.He
painted a young peasant with a sickle, a
woman weeping, two women kneeling in prayer, a woman with a child in her lap, a
girl looking at a baby in its cradle….

I turned to the poet Rilke, who had spent much
time studying Cesanne, Rodin, and van Gogh, among others.He had spent hour
after hour in museums,
studying works of art….I turned to Vincent’s letters and met him there.It was like talking with the artist
himself.I listened and from him learned
how to look at his pictures.In those
letters, Vincent taught me the purpose of his paintings.“In a picture,
I want to say something
comforting, as music is comforting.I
want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo
used to symbolize….”

His sketch, At Eternity’s Gate, is of
a man sitting in a chair, his face buried in his hands.“In this print
I have tried to express,” said
van Gogh, “what seems to me one of the strongest proofs of existence…of God and
eternity – certainly in the infinitely touching expression of such a little old
man, which he himself is perhaps unconscious of, when he is sitting quietly in
his corner by the fire.At the same time
there is something precious, something noble, which cannot be destined for
worms.”

….Vincent’s
mental state deteriorated.So did the
state of his spiritual life.The erosion
of faith is chronicled in the letters he wrote over the ten years that spanned
his life as an artist.The Scripture
quotations, references to God, and reflections of his faith, gradually grew
fewer and farther between.At the same
time, the anguish and despair grew greater and darker and more turbulent.On
May 8, 1889, the ailing artist was
admitted to Saint-Remy asylum a few miles northeast of Arles, France.He was
given a bedroom there, sparsely
furnished, and a small room off it.In
the meticulously researched movie about van Gogh’s life, Lust for Life,
the nun who first showed him his room at the asylum
asked, “Would you like me to open the windows?”Vincent nodded.When she opened
them, he looked out on the countryside with it sun-washed fields, and it was
the turning point in his life.He
converted the small room off his bedroom into a studio and started once again
to paint….Later that year he finished the painting Starry Night….Of that
painting, Vincent wrote:“That raises
again the eternal question:Is the whole
of life visible to us, or do we in fact know only the one hemisphere before we
die?For my part I know nothing with any
certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream, in the same simple way as
I dream about the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.”

In the
end only Theo understood the passion burning within Vincent, a fire that burned
and burned until it burned out.The last
spark is captured on canvas in a picture he painted in July 1890, titled simply,
Cornfield with Crows.”Vincent
wrote Theo about the painting.“A vast
field of wheat under troubled skies” is the way he described it, “and I did not
need to go out of my way to express sadness and extreme loneliness.”[Recent
biographers believe the fatal bullet
was inflicted by a boy he knew with a ‘malfunctioning gun’, not suicidal].The bullet lodged below his heart.The wound was not immediately fatal,
and he
was taken to his room where he was attended by a physician and where his
brother rushed to his side.At 1:30 in
the morning on July 29, 1890, while Theo was holding Vincent in his arms, the
artist spoke his last words.“La
tristesse durea.”“The sadness will never go away.”

Through
his pictures and his letters, through a movie and a song about him, I saw the
artist and something of the artist’s soul.But I saw something else.I saw
through him something of the great Artist of souls –Jesus.“Christ”
said van Gogh, “is more of an artist than the artists; He works in the living
spirit
and the living flesh; He makes men instead of statues.”

When thou passeth through the
waters, I will be with
thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest
through the fire, thou shall not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle
thee.For I am the Lord thy God, the
Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour.Isaiah
43:2-3